Comment 11 for bug 333204

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 7:26 PM, Rui Nibau <email address hidden> wrote:
> Do you mean using a form for ui (quite cool), relying on special markup
> in the plain text page to define which content belongs to which field ?

Yes that is my intention. After all zim is a desktop app, so we can
use interactive widgets to improve over just pre-formatted text in the
page.

> Example of a book page :
>
>    Content-Type: text/x-zim-wiki
>    Wiki-Format: zim 0.4
>    Creation-Date: 2011-02-02T16:25:56.359000
>    Template: Book
>    Content-Fields: Author,Publication Date,ISBN,Summary,Review
>
>    ====== Smoke And Mirrors ======
>    Created Wednesday 02 February 2011
>
>    :Author: Gaiman Neil
>    :Publication Date:  1998
>    :ISBN: 0-06-093470-0
>
>    :Summary:
>
>    blablabla but short
>
>    :Review:
>
>    blablabla but longer
>
>
> Mockup of ui for that page : (see attached picture)

I really like both the syntax example and the mockup image. My own
syntax idea was to use email header style blocks, but this is much
more human readable.

One detail to be aware of though is that in this mockup the page title
+ created date will not be directly editable unless we put them in a
text areas (which will be ugly). Not completely sure how to make this
intuitive. Text below the form will not be an issue, because any form
can end with a "Comments" or "Notes" text area for arbitrary free form
text.

For the syntax I'm also still thinking where to put a definition of
the data type in each field. In particular the ability to have
specific fields link to other pages would be great (e.g. specify
somehow that "Author" should map to a page in the "Authors"
namespace). Or, to give another example, force a certain input to be
numeric or specify the field for the book cover to be an image. Such
meta-data can perfectly go in the page itself, but could also be
stored in the template and link that from the page.

I'm more or less decided to disable it for the upcoming 0.50 release
with a commitment from my side to make it full-featured in the next
release.

Regards,

Jaap

P.S. once we have such forms I would really like a plugin that can
fill in pages for books based on ISBN number - I happen to have a hand
held USB bar code scanner in my desk :)